Dawn of the Geeks

on the way to fixing the server. At first I was annoyed that my server’s content drive crashed and I lost three large sites. But after pointing the server at Free Ringtone Heaven and watching ad revenue go way up I’ve decided not to be in a such a hurry to repair the server.

What a lot of spammers do is create large content filled web-sites full of garbage which is then indexed by Google but when visitors find the site they are deluged with ads. My version of open directory was getting around 600 or more unique visitors a day from thousands of different search terms every month. Now that all hits are redirected to Free Ringtone Heaven, FRH is getting all those hits and effectively being found with thousands of different search terms.

The difference between what spammers do and what’s happing with my server however is that Google will be getting redirected just the same as all the visitors. I just happen to not believe in 404 error pages. I think they’re pointless and stupid. Rather than telling a visitor what they were looking for is gone I’m pointing them at something else that might be useful. In the case of Indie-Mobile, those who were searching for ringtones will end up at a very good alternative rathing than just being told the site no longer exists.

So basically now all the searches that ended up at Indie-Mobile and DMOZ (and other minor sites) are being filtered into a single point of entry. The result is a huge increase in ad revenue. And, since Google takes forever to clean up sites that no longer exist from it’s database, I can expect to maintain this increase for at least a month or two.

So the moral of this story is that if a site isn’t making money, crashes, or you just want to move on to something else, don’t kill your old domains. Redirect all the traffic to your new project. You can then benefit from all the existing search engine indexing and visitors which speeds up the process of your new site being indexed.

Just DO NOT show Google one thing and your visitors something else. You will very likely getting dropped from Google.

Google was taking it’s sweet time indexing Free Ringtone Heaven. I think with more than 1000 unique visitors a day, Google will speed it up a bit.

So DMOZ, Indie-Mobile and DevCenter are done for. Indie-Mobile was the most profitable but FRH is doing fine as a replacement. Indie-Mobile will just remain a redirect to FRH so I don’t lose all that indexing on Google before FRH is indexed itself. Once I get the server repaired I’ll be working on whole new projects.